The moment her voice message warned me someone was inside my locked house, I staged my own disappearance—only to watch a figure walk into my room that froze my blood cold.

The moment her voice message warned me someone was inside my locked house, I staged my own disappearance—only to watch a figure walk into my room that froze my blood cold.

It began with a single missed call.

Then another.

Then the voice message—urgent, shaking, and barely coherent.

“Don’t go home. Someone’s inside. I swear I heard footsteps… your door was locked but—just don’t go back.”

At first, I thought she was mistaken. My house was secured, every window bolted, every camera synced to my phone. No one could get in without tripping an alarm. But as her trembling whisper replayed again and again, something inside me tightened.

So instead of going home, I did something I never imagined I’d have the nerve to do.

I disappeared.

I parked my car two streets away. Turned off my phone. Slipped into the woods behind my property with nothing but a flashlight and the small thermal camera I used for work. From there, I had a perfect view of my bedroom window—the one I always left slightly ajar but locked from the inside.

The night was completely still, unnervingly quiet.

Then movement.

A shadow gliding behind the curtain. Slow. Deliberate. Like someone who belonged there.

My breath caught.
My hands went numb.
And every instinct in me screamed to run.

Instead, I raised the camera.

On the display, a human silhouette glowed in a faint orange heat signature—standing near my desk, rummaging through drawers I kept hidden under layers of clothing. The drawers no one even knew existed.

My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it echoing inside my skull.

Then the figure turned toward the window.

Step by step, it approached.
Step by step, it came into view.
Step by step, it forced my brain to accept something that made absolutely no sense.

The face.

My face.

Not similar.
Not distorted.
Not blurred by the glass.

My exact face—down to the scar near my eyebrow.

I froze so completely I wasn’t sure I was breathing anymore. The man—if I could even call him that—tilted his head slowly, like he sensed me out there in the darkness. And then his lips curled into a faint, knowing smile.

A smile I had never seen on myself.

He stepped closer. Lifted something. Pressed it against the window. For a moment, I thought it was a note.

It wasn’t.

It was my spare house key.

The one I’d lost a month earlier.

Before I could think, before I could move, before I could even feel the terror fully settle, the window slid open from the inside—silently, effortlessly.

And the figure whispered, in my exact voice:

“You should’ve come home.”